Category: Uncategorized
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Princeton Faculty Passes Grade Quota
Yesterday the Princeton faculty passed the proposed grade inflation resolution (discussed here), establishing a quota on A-level grades. From now on, no more than 35% of the course grades awarded by any department may be A-level grades, and no more than 55% of independent work grades may be A-level. I had to miss the meeting…
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What is a Speedbump?
One thing I learned at the Harvard Speedbumps conference is that many people agree that “speedbump DRM” is a good idea; but they seem to have very different opinions of what “speedbump DRM” means. (The conference was declared “off the record” so I can’t attribute specific opinions to specific people or organizations.) One vision of…
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How Much Information Do Princeton Grades Convey?
One of the standard arguments against grade inflation is that inflated grades convey less information about students’ performaces to employers, graduate schools, and the students themselves. In light of the grade inflation debate at Princeton, I decided to apply information theory, a branch of computer science theory, to the question of how much information is…
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California Panel Recommends Decertifying One Diebold System
The State of California’s Voting Systems Panel has voted to recommend the decertification of Diebold’s TSx e-voting system, according to a release from verifiedvoting.org. The final decision will be made by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, but he is expected to approve the recommendation within the next week. The TSx is only one of the…
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Copyright and Cultural Policy
James Grimmelmann offers another nice conference report, this time from the Seton Hall symposium on “Peer to Peer at the Crossroads”. I had expressed concern earlier about the lack of technologists on the program at the symposium, but James reports that the lawyers did just fine on their own, steering well clear of the counterfactual…
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Another Form of Grade Inflation
You may recall Princeton’s proposal to fight grade inflation by putting a quota on the number of A’s that can be awarded. Joe Barillari made a brilliant followup proposal in yesterday’s Daily Princetonian, to fight the “problem” of inflation in students’ ratings of their professors’ teaching.
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Diebold Misled Officials about Certification
Diebold Election Systems knowingly used uncertified software in California elections, despite warnings from its lawyers that doing so was illegal and might subject the company to criminal sanctions and decertification in California, according to Ian Hoffman’s story in the Oakland Tribune. The story says that Diebold made false representations about certification to state officials: The…
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Industry to Sue Supernode Operators?
Rumor has it that the recording industry is considering yet another tactic in their war on peer-to-peer filesharing: lawsuits against people whose computers act as supernodes. Supernodes are a feature of some P2P networks, such as the FastTrack network used by Kazaa and Grokster. Supernodes act as hubs for the P2P network, helping people find…
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Cyber-Security Research Undersupported
Improving cybersecurity is supposedly a national priority in the U.S., but after reading Peter Harsha’s report on a recent meeting of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), it’s clear that cybersecurity research is severely underfunded. Here’s a summary: The National Science Foundation has very little security research money, enough to fund 40% or less…
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A Perfectly Compatible Form of Incompatibility
Scientific American has published an interview with Leonardo Chiariglione, the creator of the MP3 music format and formerly head of the disastrous Secure Digital Music Initiative. (SDMI tried to devise a standard for audio content protection. The group suffered from serious internal disagreements, and it finally dissolved after a failed attempt to use DMCA lawsuit…